A Quick Review on 2008 Summer Movies

As the TV season has come to a close, what with all your favorites shows airing their finales already, and networks announcing the upcoming fall lineup, you know it's definitely summer.

For some, the summer started as early as mid-March. But even now, the kids are on holiday, the ladies' shorts are just getting shorter, and yeah- summer movies are still pretty much in full swing.

Let's take a quick review at Summer Movies 2008: what we've had so far, and what's headed our way these next several weeks.

May 2008

Definitely the biggest movie this month was Marvel Entertainment's Iron Man. The Jon Favreau-directed live action adaptation of one of the biggest names in the Marvel Universe has paid off very nicely for everyone involved in the project. Indeed, Iron Man has the distinction of having the 10th biggest opening weekend of all time, and has (as of this writing) already made almost half a billion dollars in worldwide box-office receipts.

Due to the generally lukewarm response to the first Narnia film, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian didn't open as well as the first (about US$10 million short of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe's opening weekend of US$65.6 million), but is doing rather well. In fact, reviews from both the public and critics have been generally favorable, with the sales to prove it. With worldwide box-office receipts at US$113 million (as of this writing), and still climbing, Disney does have a reason to be happy.

The buzz is, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull just might be another big summer cash cow. In its opening weekend, the latest movie in the Indiana Jones series of flicks had already made US$151 million, making it the second biggest Memorial Day weekend movie (right after Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End). As of this writing, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull had already made over US$311 million worldwide.

Coming up this week is the highly anticipated Sex and the City movie. Heck, you can probably already call it the chick flick of the year. Let's see how it turns out this week.

Also out this month were the romance comedy Made of Honor, starring Patrick Dempsey and Michelle Monaghan, the British comedy Son of Rambow, Frontier(s) - the After Dark HorrorFest movie that had to be shown separately because of its NC-17 rating, and the surprisingly disappointing Speed Racer.

June 2008

Coming out this month: Adam Sandler's latest comedy You Don't Mess With The Zohan and the DreamWorks animated feature Kung Fu Panda starring Jack Black both open on June 6. June 13 sees the re-imagining of the Marvel Universe's The Incredible Hulk, as well as M.Night Shyamalan's latest thriller- The Happening.

Then we also have Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway teaming up for Get Smart and the latest Mike Myers project The Guru, coming out on June 20. Finally we have the Pixar/Walt Disney animated feature Wall-E, and the action-packed Wanted starring Morgan Freeman, James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie coming out on the 27th.

Also interesting: the limited release foreign film Mongol by Sergei Bodrov. It's about a young Genghis Khan and his epic rise to power. Check out the trailer here.

July 2008

This month, we have the off-beat superhero movie Hancock starring Will Smith opening on the 4th of July, and then we have the Guillermo del Toro-directed Hellboy II: The Golden Army opening the week after that.

On July 18, we have Mamma Mia! (the Abba-themed movie starring Meryl Streep) and the Andy Samberg-created Space Chimps. But most importantly, out comes the highly anticipated sequel to Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight- which I personally hope turns out to be one of the best Batman movies ever.

Check out the trailers here, if you haven't yet, and read about the accompanying animated anthology direct-to-DVD project, Batman: Gotham Knight here.

Wrapping up an impressive summer movie lineup we're going to see Will Ferrell and John C. O'Reilly team up again in Step Brothers, and something for fans of Mulder and Scully- The X-Files: I Want To Believe. Personally, I haven't seen much of the X-Files, but now I have a month to scrounge around for old X-Files episodes and catch the first movie before this one comes out.

We'll come back in a few weeks to see how all these movies have done. I'd say it's a great lineup. And 2008's definitely a great year for summer movies.

Theatrical posters from Wikipedia.

Cheers, everyone!